Decades ago one of my profs posted a four-word quote from Meister Eckhart on the bulletin board outside his office:
We grow by subtraction.
I was young, still in the addition stage of life, exuberantly growing out in all directions as horizons expanded, seemingly endlessly.
I had never heard of Meister Eckhart. I hated that quote but I couldn’t forget it.
I still hate that quote.
That intrepid freethinking German mystic (1260-1328) said some other things I really dislike, too:
The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.
And:
Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest to all of us.
It’s odd then, that I immediately loved Ursula le Guin’s similar quote from ‘The Creation of Ea’, her mythic song of origins in the Earthsea books:
only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk’s flight
on the empty sky.
Hate them or love them, I’ve found that quotes like these distill wisdom that I need in this subtracting stage of life, where my horizons have constricted drastically and all my growth seems to be in the quiet sheltering darkness of my interior self.
I ran into Meister Eckhart occasionally in random reading in the intervening years but it is only recently that I discovered what a wise companion he is in processing loss.
It’s hard to talk about loss and grief without sounding self-pitying and maudlin on the one hand or resorting to platitudes on the other. I hope this post doesn’t fall irredeemably on either side. I know that there are many many people who post on this site whose losses have been far more disastrous than mine but i’ve discovered comparisons aren’t helpful. One has to work with one’s own material, and I don’t want to either minimize or exaggerate my own or others’ losses and grief. What hurts for any of us, well, just plain hurts.
No one gets out of here without scars. The point is to develop the resilience that allows one to keep getting up even in hellish places and keep going. (thanks to Winston Churchill for that image.)
My own larger context for thinking about loss and grief and what hurts was shaped definitively by an experience we had in the Gwembe Valley in Zambia. Sir os and I worked as community development volunteers for 3 years in the 80s in Southern Province and occasionally our work took us down into the valley, one of the most undeveloped and poverty-stricken places on the planet.
We had been invited by a village headman. We didn’t know how big his village was; it turned out to be a bedraggled cluster of just three thatched huts and an open cooking rondavel, far out in the parched desolately sparse bush. He and his three wives were in rags; so were the lucky children while the unlucky rest, each tiny bone protruding, were naked except for filthy strings around their middles. It appeared to me that every single possession they owned including their whole store of food and the plow could easily have fit into a wheelbarrow.
We had been in many villages by then, but this was the poorest. We thought that perhaps we would be offered a handful of groundnuts as offering food to guests was a socially mandatory act. Sir os and I had an ironclad commitment to always accept food when offered as many expats would not and that refusal, seen as arrogance, seriously hurt relationships.
We’d been vegetarian for years, but we ate anything we were served; we drank sweet beer with swirling chunks of fermented maize in it, ate mopani worms, eggs as tiny as queen olives, and village chicken drumsticks smaller than my thumb which were so tough my first attempted bite didn’t leave a mark. But this visit brought the hardest challenge of them all.
The first wife brought out the food and lifted the chipped plate covering the mound of nsima, the thick porridge-like staple food made from pounded maize or millet which we had come to love. Then she took off the plate on the relish bowl, the sauce one eats with the nsima. We both nearly retched aloud. It looked like meat….but it smelled like old roadkill.
Sir os and I carefully avoided each other’s gaze knowing that if our eyes met, it would be all over. Each swallowed bit met the prior one trying to come back up—never have I so struggled to make mind master over body. It is always hot in the Gwembe but new sweat prickled out from toes to upper lip and scalp. (Reading this out loud to Sir os just now caused him to break out in a sweat all over again 30 years later! He took off his shirt and turned on the fan.)
Meanwhile, our host, thrilled that he had been able to provide meat--feast food--ate with gusto, sucking every shred off the bones. That gave us some degree of courage; he clearly didn’t anticipate an anguished death from dysentery or food poisoning.
(Was it road kill? Some skunky kind of bush meat? Had he traded for a bit of billy goat meat without its scent glands removed? We don’t know. But we didn’t get sick.)
We ate enough to be polite, carefully ending with a mouthful of plain pounded millet. After the meal, one of the younger wives came up very diffidently and greeted me—in English, a surprise so far out in the bush. We chatted a bit in her broken English and my even more broken Chitonga.
She asked a question that is now chiseled in my mind like Meister Eckhart’s four-word quote: Where is your village?
I was stunned into complete silence.
I have no village. There is no ‘home place’ where I will always know I have the right of return. I have carried home on my back, like scars thickened into tortoiseshell, since I was a toddler.
She watched me with those beautiful guileless eyes; there was no artifice in these Batonga people. She saw the expression in my face and a response ignited on her own and suddenly everything flipped upside down: I realized with a shock that in her eyes was compassion, kindness, pity.
In spite of? because of? having so little, she had piled up wisdom, knowlege of the most important things.
She—in rags, no food security for herself or her children, life expectancy of 37—felt compassion and kindness for me, a white and therefore privileged woman, but one without a village.
Meister Eckhart comments,
Our bodily food is changed into us but our spiritual food changes us into it.
Her husband fed us bush meat that fortunately ‘changed into us’ without making us sick and gave us the strength and energy to carry on that day with work we thought important.
His wife, this village woman, gave me food for my spirit: kindness, compassion and a shift in perspective that for 30+ years has continued to humble me, keeps challenging all I think I know.
Eckhart, again:
We must come into a transformed knowing, an unknowing which comes not from ignorance but from knowledge.
I’ve written before about my illness and descent into disability here and here, and the ferreting out, layer by layer, of the underlying issues to my baffling treatment-resistant symptoms including ictal syncope, a seizure disorder that slows and stops my heart; brain damage and other cognitive issues; fatigue; migraines; joint and muscle pain; a hodgepodge of acronyms: PCOS, IBS, GERD, chronic UTI.
Suffice it to say now that my docs finally have a diagnosis which makes sense out of these disparate pieces: I have a mitochondrial myopathy (mm), a genetic energy and muscle disease which was mostly latent until my early 50s. The mm was probably a genetic mistake in the mitochondrial DNA at my conception as there is no family history of it in my maternal line of descent although I’ve passed it on to our two children.
There were clues earlier; I had 6 miscarriages, was always stiffer and more prone to post-exercise fatigue and muscle soreness than my peers when I was a teenage track and field/cross country jock. We don’t know what precipitated an adult onset of more severe symptoms; I did have a traumatic brain injury a year before the seizures began although seizure disorders are common in mm without any trauma.
In any case, I was still heading towards the top of my game when things began to unravel. This was during the peak busy years of a demanding job with a 4th grader and a young teen at home.
I’ll take a quick snapshot of the life I had.
I began most days with an early 1 hour workout at a conveniently close gym. My office was just over 4 miles away on pleasant residential streets; I walked in as often as I could. Exercise time was me-time, for mental and emotional health as well as physical well-being.
My office was also just a few blocks from a trail head for the high desert trails on the edge of Boise and in five minutes I could be completely out of the sounds, smells and sight of the city, watching ‘bright the hawk’s flight/on the empty sky’’ in that sagebrush-scented air. I often saw peregrine falcons, bald eagles, many other birds in addition to the large and small four-leggeds: mule deer, rabbits, ground squirrels, fox.
We had wonderful times camping in Idaho’s back country. Hot springs! City of Rocks! The Sawtooths! Little white-water rivers yelling all night beside the tent!
Our kids had major food allergies so I cooked and baked everything from scratch, made in 4 gallon batches on my days off and then frozen in meal-size packages. I kept two full-size freezers stocked so on work days supper could be ready in a matter of minutes.
For years our kids preferred having their friends come to our house so we often had sleepovers, crafts parties, movie nights, drop ins and extra people for supper. Three neighbor girls stopped in for breakfast on their way to school on a regular basis. Candy was an essential food group for them and I thought they’d quail at our industrial-strength wheat-free dairy-free egg-free blueberry pancakes after having a bag of jelly beans for breakfast. To my surprise they tucked right in—and came back. This delighted me; the kids are right when they say I have a compulsion to feed people.
We were part of a vibrant community; friends were a daily pleasure. Sir os had siblings and extended family in Idaho, another major plus as we’d rarely lived near family before. Thanksgiving dinner with 15-20 people! What a blast after years of holidays just being the 4 of us plus whoever else we could scratch up.
And, no small thing, the girls were finally (mostly) healthy and we slowly dug our way out of the financial hole the thousands of dollars in medical bills from their early childhoods had left us. While we were never flush we were finally reasonably comfortable with enough discretionary money for gifts, music lessons for the kids, hobbies, trips to see the grandparents.
Wendell Berry talks about marriage as a ‘generous enclosure’ and that was a guiding description of what we strove to build between us and around our partnership. I loved living generously and creatively, I loved the multi-tasking, the constant choreography of getting all the details tucked safely into the corners of each week.
I felt that what I did mattered, that my work and care and attention made the quality of other people’s lives better in real, tangible ways.
So, I loved my life. When I see photos from those years I am always stunned at how happy I look, in fact, how happy all of us look. While there was a lot of drama, challenge and intensity in my work and at home, it was largely good drama, good stress.
And all that ended, just dribbled away. Some loss was nearly imperceptible in the hectic pace of weeks and months until I’d look back and realize, appalled, how much function had evaporated. Other losses happened in drastic, seismic shifts. (The exception, thankfully, is the marriage, which is still good.)
The seizures, undiagnosed for 7 years, hammered away at my brain. Often people with temporal lobe epilepsy begin seeing visions and having bizarre religious experiences; for me all sense of the transcendent disappeared. This was a shock, having been a closet mystic my whole life, searching for meaning beyond the material world.
My facility with words disappeared. First to go were the languages I’d studied, then even English became harder and harder. This was a major problem as I did a lot of writing and public speaking. I could read a book or an article and not retain it, then sometimes was unable to even follow the train of thought. This had never happened; it couldn’t happen—my vocation depended on it not happening. But it did.
Eventually, I couldn’t read sequentially. I’d jump all over the page, thumb through the book randomly, try to get a sense of the gestalt when the components wouldn’t sit down quietly in a row. Even light novels were a challenge. For a long time I only reread my old familiar favorites; new books were nothing but aggravation.
The hikes in the foothills ended abruptly after I nearly didn’t make it back one time—I didn’t pass out completely but was as drained as I was in the ictal shadow after flatlining. I had never heard of exercise intolerance and could not understand why suddenly after even mild exercise I had longer and longer rebound times to the point where it became so counter-productive I had to stop. I worked with a personal trainer for months trying to find some regimen that I could do without being flattened for several days. Nothing helped regain that ground.
I’d always been able to focus, thriving in chaos but now I craved silence as noise derailed my thoughts and made desk work difficult or impossible. Being with people was exhausting—and that was my work, my life.
Hardest of all were the losses in our family life. Our marriage suffered. Our kids suffered. The frequent laughter-filled meals around our table with our kids and their friends quit happening. Our eldest as she turned 16 began to disengage from the family which we anticipated would happen in the normal course of things—but not in the painful ways she chose.
She tried to run away, she got in with a group of kids where she was the only one from a stable family and where all adults were automatically suspect. They seemed like feral children, raising themselves. She spent hours texting friends who were cutters, suicidal, trying to persuade them to stay alive even if only for the next day. A kid from that group who did manage to run away turned up dead on the streets in Portland a few months later.
She started drinking, using drugs, was date-raped, caught shoplifting, nearly flunked out. She left our home a few weeks after graduating from high school, making it very clear that we had no right of influence on her or her decision to move to Arizona and live with the divorced dreadlocked young man 7 years her senior she’d recently met.
Our youngest took on the role of the ‘good kid’ and grew increasingly protective of me, yet was a mess to live with—reactive, resentful and angry at her losses and disappointed by impossible expectations. I don’t know how she would have coped without our beloved old dog and the succession of pet rats she kept tucked in her sleeves or on her shoulder most of her waking hours at home.
The undemanding, unconditional interspecies affection of furry creatures is one of the most astonishing miracles the universe has brought forth! And then the dog died in my arms, suddenly, after his vet couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Eeesh.
By the time I was into the year of medical leave, I was so ill and weak that I rarely left the couch. Pain and brain fog would leave my screen blank to the point that I was nearly mute. In conversations, my wheels would turn but there was no forward verbal movement. The long awkward gaps baffled my friends and frustrated my family; it was hard for anyone to know how to be supportive and bit by bit I lost most of my community.
Without my income and benefits, our financial margins shrank by more than half. We were hit hard by the crash of ’08, and again when we sold our house in Boise. The disability insurance my employer took out on me had a 6 month waiting period; I missed it by 2 weeks. So, no insurance.
Meister Eckhart has another comment I dislike but had I recognized the truth in it perhaps I would have been more grace-filled in the losses as they occurred:
Treat all things as if they were loaned to you without any ownership—whether body or soul, sense or strength, external goods or honors, house or hall…everything.
And that is what it felt like; all I thought was mine—even my mind—was only loaned, and the loans were called in one after another.
If that quote isn’t bleak enough, Eckhart has another:
Everything is meant to be lost, that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness.
That sounds like birth, being inexorably stripped of all comfort, warmth and automatic sustenance, relentlessly squeezed through a cervix, an os that gives out into ‘unhampered nothingness,’ as risk-filled as any delivery in rural Africa.
After all the activity, connections and intensity of my former life, I felt as though I was dangling alone in a vast threatening sky; too exhausted and brain-blank to think, read, write.
I’ve always disliked TV; this expanded to not being able to tolerate electronic voices whether in music, on radio or in movies.
By then we had adopted another rescue dog, a horrible little Shih Tzu mix who didn’t like men and who bit Sir os and was grumpy and demanding. But she loved me and I don’t know what I would have done without her warm little body on my lap for all those weeks and months of mute staring. She also absorbed a lot of salt water; after years of being unable to cry coming out of my hardboiled past, I sobbed out a compensatory ocean.
At the end of the day when our youngest would come home from school and Sir os from work, I would make an enormous effort to pull myself back to the ground and try to act ‘normal.’ A therapist told me years ago to ‘fake it until you make it.’
That phrasing didn’t connect particularly well, but Eckhart puts it this way:
Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. Learn to behave thus even in deepest distress and keep yourself that way in any and every estate of life.
Getting at this in another way, he says,
I have often said that a person who wishes to begin a good life should be like one who draws a circle. Let him or her get the center in the right place and keep it so and the circumference will be good.
So I would aim for that center, to scrape up words that still meant something, trying desperately to respond to my prickly teenager and stressed spouse, to be loving, to be kind, to be present.
The Meister makes this even more concrete:
The most important hour is always the present.
The most significant person is precisely the one sitting across from you right now.
The most necessary work is always love.
I had two dreams during this time that graphically got at what I was experiencing and offered an inner image vocabulary that was helpful. I have had PTSD my whole life from sexual assault as a toddler but by this point it wasn’t hugely intrusive anymore. I still have nightmares occasionally and this first one began like a typical assault dream but the ending was unique and hopeful in a ghastly sort of way:
I am down in the basement when I hear a noise from the stairs. I turn to see a demonically hideous figure leaping down the steps towards me. I don’t try to run to the back door; instead I stand and grow roots down through my feet, nailing me to the concrete. By the time he gets to me, my roots are already deep into the earth growing through the ancient layered campsites of Native Americans. I face him calmly knowing i was about to die while, foaming with rage and hate, he snaps off my twig-like fingers, hands, my arms, leaving me a stump—but my roots are beyond his reach.
The other dream sounds awful but it was so over-the-top that I woke up laughing:
A melodramatic voice says, ‘this was your brain.’ I see a single gorgeous tree out in a field just after the leaves have fallen in glory about its foot but the grass is still green. It has a magnificent spread; as it has not been impinged upon by other trees it has flourished in all directions, huge graceful limbs spreading joyfully out into the clear sky with myriad interlocking twigs knitting lace against the blue.
Then the voice intones, ‘this is your brain now.’ the sky clouds over, the tree is gone. The field, like the sky, is a monochrome grey-brown and is littered with junk and random cables tangled between discarded refrigerators lying on their sides. Protecting this dismal debris is an unfenced rabidly vicious junkyard dog but i’m not afraid of it. I look more carefully at the refrigerators and realize with a start that they are coffins!
Somehow, this dream activated my sense of absurdity, of ludicrousness, of ‘well, it’s not that bad! At least, the coffins aren’t buried yet, and there is some circuitry left!’ I laughed so hard that Sir os woke up and I told him the dream. He was quiet for a bit and then said, ‘Well, i’m glad you find it funny.’
My kids have always told me disparagingly, ‘You are so easily amused!’ when I crack up at some corny thing beneath their dignity.
But I honestly think my lifelong habit of cultivating humor—especially self-deprecatory humor—has saved me. When I was a bullied ostracized and suicidal kid, I couldn’t laugh at myself; the very act would have jarred and crumbled the fragile screen of illusions that were all I had to defend my damaged self.
When I left home at 17 and began to find my tribe, my sense of self began to grow and to heal; it eventually became solid enough to be able to step beyond and to both celebrate and to laugh at the truth of what I saw. Eckhart has a sweet description of a similar heuristic exploration:
When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.
Do you see why I have learned to love this man’s wisdom?! ‘Throwing out images in front’ of me is how I navigate!
The other life habit that was absolutely essential in surviving this bleak time was gratitude. Eckhart says,
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, that will suffice.
Even the worst days have something in them to be grateful for.
When my pacemaker lead perforated the bottom of my heart 3 1/2 years after implantation—which never happens, but did— I couldn’t get my cardiologist to take me seriously until I was nearly dead in her office.
Then, suddenly, it was high drama. I think she saw a lawsuit on her hands and could not get me out of her office and into the hospital fast enough. I spent 3 or 4 days in the hospital waiting until the stars aligned for surgery while my pericardium filled with blood. The only cardiologist in Idaho that could do a lead retrieval would not do it until there was a thoracic surgeon able to be present in theatre in case I needed to be cracked open. And of course, there was only one thoracic surgeon in all of Idaho at that time and he was out of town.
When I woke up after surgery I knew immediately that my sternum hadn’t been cracked and was simply overwhelmed with gratitude to be alive. Sir os, the girls and my whole Idaho family of inlaws snuck in a couple at a time past the staff; when one of them came over to the bed to kiss my cheek I shocked her by croaking, ‘You’re standing on my oxygen tube!’
Our daughters, who knew that punchline to an old joke, laughed hysterically which broke the anxious mood. Apparently I said a few unfiltered things as well while still under the influence of big drugs. The memory is pretty blurry but I do vividly remember the laughter and the gratitude—and the nurse hustling in looking askance at the hilarity and summarily shooing everyone out so the patient could rest.
Even after the seizures that stopped my heart and repeatedly flung me into a bizarre out-of-body loop, I learned I could say to myself, ‘Right now, i’m okay. My heart is beating again. I’m so grateful; right now, I don’t have to move or even open my eyes. Right now, I still have people to love; I’m so grateful. Right now, I hear the chickadees singing in the shrubs outside; thank you for your endless perky optimism. Right now, I am grateful that I don’t even have to fix dinner; Sir os will put out celery and peanut butter and that covers it.’
This may all sound eccentrically goofy, but it sure is better than self talk that goes ‘I will never be able to work again; we’re going to lose our house; our daughter may be dead in a ditch; I should just let go and die quickly so Sir os can find another partner who has something to offer…’
I want to fast-forward to where I find myself now. I continue to try to trace the tangled circuitry between the interred chunks of my former self, to try to get to know this new stump of a person with deep roots.
Eckhart comments that:
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.
A lot has been erased and i’ve had to go back and erase much more. Who I actually am now at 62 is wildly different from who I thought I would be as I traced out the trajectory of the identity I’d crafted in my first 50 years. I hope to be able to write the ‘true thing’ even though its shape is still largely hidden.
Eventually I hope to see that image clearly enough to cast it out in front of me and step fully into it; in the meantime I navigate as I can by the light of small flickers of intuition, glints of humor, flashes of gratitude.
I still can’t plan or commit to much as I don’t know from one day to the next what I will be able to do. (We made it to the women’s march. Ha! She gloats.) On the rare occasions when I do plan something about half the time I have to bail. Three days this week I’ve had to go back to bed after breakfast. Some days I can walk on smooth surfaces without a cane; other days I hobble and fall, even in the house.
The sheer unpredictability can make me a little crazy; I may swear and want to sob before I find the grace to let go of my plans and fall back into bed.
When the tank is empty, the tank is empty and no kick at the gas pedal helps.
Eckhart says,
Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.
Whether willing or not, this is just the way it is and while it is futile to bark at reality, that futility doesn’t often stop me from vocalizing my outrage.
I still find it much easier to be angry than to let go and simply grieve.
I get so angry at my body. I started working on this piece a month ago and had it essentially done last week. I was pleased that that gave me this week to shorten it considerably and smooth it all out. Instead, I’ve had a series of bad days, migraine, muscle pain, brain fog….so you are getting the long version instead of a sleek one. I’m so annoyed. It is hard not to feel betrayed by my body.
I have to really work at this anger as I know it’s not a healthy stance and it probably plays out in making me more prone to injury. There is an exceedingly thin line between building up stamina and over-extension which damages my muscles and yanks me back to the bottom of the hill. What worked yesterday may leave me with a month or more of spasms if I try it again today.
Sir os keeps a narrow side-eye on me as I start a day with big hopes. If he has doubts or worries he usually keeps them to himself but is gracious beyond belief about setting his work aside and without a word of complaint helping me finish up. We’ve always shared household and childrearing tasks pretty equitably but i’ve gotten quite possessive about the things that i can still do. He knows it nearly kills me to ask for help and he is expert at pitching in without being obvious about it.
But I can’t not hammer on my limits. Even with the potential setbacks, my current muse is right:
The cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.
I make mistakes often, miscalculate my strength and stamina, and yet I slowly am coming to a certain degree of equanimity, of serenity and peace. I do my absolute best to keep getting up, to keep going, to do what I can, when I can, and try to let it go when I can’t; and hardest by far, try not be bitter with myself when I overdo.
I am learning that living with caprice means that every tiny bit of benefit I can dredge up in any moment needs to be seized, recognized, enjoyed—right now, without judgment that it’s not enough.
I used to reserve that effort for big important accomplishments. Now, it’s all worth celebrating, from I clipped my toenails! to I watered the houseplants! to I made a batch of dill pickles!
On some days, clipping my toenails may be the puny extent of what I accomplish. We still have days where celery and peanut butter are dinner. I have to simply breathe and let it be, setting aside all former definitions of effectiveness and competence and value to live with trust that the Meister is correct when he reminds me sharply that:
The outward work will never be puny if the inward one is great.
I didn’t consider my kids’ efforts to learn to walk, to navigate kindergarten, to learn to read, puny. I don’t dare consider my own efforts to learn to re-navigate life puny, either. I am groping towards Eckhart’s ‘transformed knowing, an unknowing...’ and this is by no means an easy--or puny--thing.
Eckhart reminds me,
Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.
I think he’s on the right track, but there are lots of days where I have to substitute ‘be’ for ‘do.’ I am slowly discovering that I can find delight in be-ing as well as do-ing. That is especially possible when I’m outside, watching the flow of plant, bird and animal life around me. We love living in the country again.
A ongoing area of loss for us is not having a community. The physiatrist who diagnosed me with mm was delighted to hear I was moving to an area where I knew just two people: my spouse and my father in law. ‘Keep it that way; don’t get to know anybody else! Stay out of groups!’ he ordered. ‘We need to see if you can heal!’
I’ve diligently abided by that. An indication of the depth of my exhaustion is that for the first two years I wasn’t lonely; it’s just been the last few months that I long to have friends right here at my table and not just on Facebook or the other end of a phone call.
The other piece of the community dilemma is that we are in an area apparently as red and racist as Alabama (a judgment based on twitter patterns) and now that i’m able to leave the house a little more it is a total mystery to me where to look for kindred spirits. This is also a very white area and we desperately miss having people of color in our lives.
Still and all, many things have worked out far better than I could have imagined a few years ago. The dreadlocked young man who absconded with our oldest has become a dearly-loved son in law. The bright young daughter from his previous marriage is one of the biggest joys in my life; now 13 she has a wisdom and perspicacity that I find remarkable.
Our daughters have both turned out to be kind open-hearted competent and compassionate adults, flourishing in challenging jobs who are astonishingly enthused about their parents…they love us! We love them! They love each other!
Those ghastly years do not seem to have left a shadow on either of them. We have a blast when we get together, again talking and laughing around the table even when it is Thai takeout if mum isn’t up to something homemade.
This does not happen nearly often enough now that we’ve moved to Michigan to live with my 91 year old father in law. He’s a crusty old WW2 vet and diehard Trump supporter yet we love the old man. The couple of years we’ve had with him have been good ones; we are committed to living with him so he can stay on his farm in the house he built himself room by room in the early 50s.
There is one more thing which has seemed to stop the cascade of losses and eased the rawness of grief.
Since we don’t have a ‘village,’ I felt almost desperate to have a piece of dirt again with our names on it as we face this uncertain future. We sunk everything we could scrape up into a shabby farmhouse, nearly 100 years old.
Our house is basically solid, with a fairly new roof but needs almost everything else—new siding and windows, flooring, a new furnace, bathroom, a workable kitchen, insulation, rewiring, probably re-plumbing. (Sir os occasionally asks, ‘tell me again why we bought this place?!’ Obvious answer: because it was what we could afford!)
We will eventually want to do something about the decor which is….interesting. It’s a great case study in how to make the best of what you have with the resources you have: tired of the flocked wallpaper from 30 years ago? Well, just paint it! Sunshine yellow! Mint green!
It has enough work to keep us busy for a decade or two and probably into our old age as we will have to scrounge for 2nd hand materials as much as possible. Our hope is to eventually be off grid and to grow most of our own food; our durable model comes from the many subsistence farmers we worked with and learned from in Zambia and Tanzania.
If we didn’t have concerns about the wiring we would try to rent it out as it is livable, but for now it sits there, patiently waiting for us. It has become my personal retreat space when I need a deeper solitude to reflect, to write, to try to make sense of this squashed chrysalis stage of my one and only life.
By far the best part is the little acreage it sits on…a small pasture with grass that shoots up higher than I am tall. Great southern exposure. Places for potential garden beds. Huge maples. Flowering shrubs, daffodils, day lilies, a young dogwood and flowering crabapples. Several old extremely overgrown apple trees. Deep sandy loam, in a warmer climate zone.
We joined Arbor Day and have already planted 86 trees and shrubs with an eye to the needs of birds, bees and butterflies. All but a handful are thriving.
Yesterday as I limped unsteadily around the yard a couple of sober turkey vultures swooped in and circled very low to check me out and drop their business cards—two long black feathers. They were so close I could see their pink naked heads and big noses turn and follow me, clearly hoping for a tumble and no further movement. I laughed and any neighbors watching saw an eccentric old woman out waving her cane and talking to birds, ‘go on, undertakers; no takers for your business yet!’
Eccentric, yes, knocked clear off-center by all that derailed my happy trajectory.
But I hope my brand of eccentricity can become like the force of an off-center camshaft powering me in towards a deeper even more truth-filled center, rooted in the kind compassion of village women who know what is truly necessary in this human journey.
Rooted, too, in the millennia of layered cooking hearths buried beneath us in the earth, tended by the nurturing hands of women who have delivered all of us human children into the spaciousness and potential of a ‘center in the right place’ and have worked diligently to keep it so that ‘the circumference will be good.’
I am slowly coming to peace with the candid truth about who I am, who I may yet become and what I still can do to expand the ‘good circumference’ of the circle I still can draw: to do what I can to make this one earth a hospitable, more generous enclosure for all citizens in the stream of life, from primordial soup to nuts like me.
Of course, I look to old Eckhart for quotes on truth:
Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.
And I find this one simply alarming:
I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost truth.
No wonder Eckhart was harried by his peers for being on the borderlands of heresy. (This has been quite a week. I am nearly sitting on my own head right now to keep from saying anything about republicans, the religious right, the objects in their minds, and truth. i want this to be a politics-free zone.)
I derive real strength from my fellow citizens in the busy, buzzing stream of life on this small plot. This is where I can just be and take delight in my own be-ing and in the many beings around me. I glimpse a deep and ‘inmost truth’ simply watching them go about their daily lives.
Maybe a sense of the transcendent--of meaning, of the value of the whole being greater than the sum of the material parts--is coming back in this new angle of connection with the wisdom of the earth...if I can only cast that image out in front and fully step into it.
There are more kinds of bees here than i’ve ever seen, anywhere. The yard and pasture is stippled with molehills and every shovel of dirt turns out their major prey, earthworms. One single hole for a 12" tree had 18 healthy rose-and-white wigglers.
In early morning just 40 steps from the back door I often see a doe and two still-spotted fawns eating the early windfall apples, close enough that I can hear the crunch as they chew.
A few hours later, a wild turkey hen and her awkward adolescents were in the same spot. Today in the early sun, just after the night fog lifted from the orchard I saw a 6-point buck and a bigger one with at least 8.
The tiny wren in the trees behind the house has such a carrying operatic voice I can hear his aria in every room. A family of cardinals flits in and out of the trees by the upstairs window where i’m writing; boys and girls alike sport bright red lipstick on their pouty beaks.
There is a family of luxuriously brindled groundhogs out under the sagging shed; rabbit babies play wild early morning games in the yard with the sun glowing though their pinkly luminous ears; chipmunks and squirrels dash over the deck, sometimes very near my bare feet which makes me twitch and retract my landing gear. Sir os met a skunk while mowing last week. Fortunately, it was a placidly irenic dude who did not detonate.
I come over here (it’s several hours’ drive from dad’s) every couple of weeks to water the nursery stock and as often as I can, stay for a few days of reflection and solitude.
A few years ago, the silence I inhabited was simply blank space. Now I make visits to this shabby farmhouse for something much richer. Meister Eckhart winds up one last time, throws, and puts it right over my home plate:
I need to be silent for awhile; worlds are forming in my heart.
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